One Will Be Revealed: Guessing at The Final Cylon Model

Four have been revealed. One remains hidden.

One of the more intriguing plot threads throughout Battlestar Galactica's four season run has been the mystery (and the audience conjecture) surrounding the final five models of the Cylon.

While four of those models were tantalizingly revealed at the end of last season--stripping away the veneer of humanity from sleeper agents Colonel Tigh, Tory, Anders, and Chief Tyrol--one model still remains torturously hidden from view.

This week's episode of Battlestar Galactica ("Faith") gave us a tantalizing clue about the final five's origins as the hybrid tells Kara (besides for the fact that she is the harbinger of doom for humanity and will bring them to their end) that the final five came from Earth, from the planet of the thirteen tribe of humanity. It's an interesting twist, especially as the music that awakened them from their sleeper state was Earth music, something they had heard from their childhoods (Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower").

This to me is pretty darn shocking as I've been thinking for a while now that the Final Five don't seem to be Cylons in the general sense. We've yet to see them interact in any meaningful way with machinery (though Anders was poised to place his hand into the operating goo about the base star) or indeed do anything that indicates that they are anything but human. Yes, Tory did seem to be preternaturally strong when she flung Cally across the airlock (and Gaius noted her strength during one of their trysts), Chief Tyrol seemed to heal pretty quickly from those blows to the head from Cally, and Anders was scanned by the Raider and recognized, but other than that they do appear to be human. Tigh's eye never regrew itself and they appear to age as normal humans would. In fact, Tigh has known Adama for decades, a fact that has yet to be clarified, given his status as a Cylon sleeper agent.

If these five are in fact from Earth, I still maintain that they were seeded into the timeline at different points in order to be aboard the Galactica when it entered the nebula. In fact, I think that there's someone or something that is pulling their strings for a greater purpose than just to spy on the fleet.

I raised a point last week that these four Cylon sleeper agents all played major roles in the human resistance movement on New Caprica during the Cylon occupation. If so, then my guess for the final Cylon model would have to be among others who also held major responsibility during this conflict. Kara is too much of a red herring and, while she must play a pretty spectacular role in the dark days ahead, she can't be the Final Model.

Which leads me to poor Felix Gaeta.

Gaeta played a pivotal role in Gaius Baltar's cabinet during the Cylon occupation on New Caprica but he was also a double agent for the human resistance, secretly passing them messages and classified intelligence without any one within the Colonials aware of his identity.
Like Athena and Anders, he somehow ended up on Kara's mission aboard the Demetrius in search of the fabled blue planet... and wound up getting injured (possibly mortally) when Anders shot him for attempting to spin up the FTL drive to return to the fleet against Kara's orders.

I'm going out on a limb here, but I think he's the final Cylon. He seems to be in the right places at the right time, has access to Kara, Adama, and Baltar at various times, played an influential (if furtive) role in the resistance, and Ander's attack seems to have put the spotlight on him in a way we haven't really seen during the series so far. Of course, that assumes that he'll survive the shooting, but Tigh lived through far worse (Cylons are notoriously resilient and tenacious) and lived to tell the tale, albeit with only one eye.

What do you think? Who is your best guess for the identity of the final Cylon and why? And who do you hope definitely isn't a sleeper agent?

On the next episode of Battlestar Galactica ("Guess What's Coming to Dinner"), Laura Roslin faces some new challenges as the Colonials form an alliance with rebel Cylon forces to unleash a devastating attack upon the Cylon Resurrection Hub.